Nikolaus Hirsch

Last month I went to my first Tribeca Film Festival, seeing The Proposal, a film about Jill Magid's attempt to get the professional archive of Mexican architect Luis Barragán returned to Mexico from its current home in Switzerland. It's a now well known story that Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum bought the Barragán archive — more than 13,500 drawings and numerous other artifacts — for his fiancé Federica Zanco. She oversees the archive through the non-profit Barragan Foundation, which also holds a trademark over his non-accented name (like the Foundation) and has a copyright over his works. Magid, who focuses her conceptual art on power and control, was drawn to the circumstances behind the archive and made the documentary, as well as objects, exhibitions, and this book, around the subject and her attempt at changing its ownership. The book was made a couple years before the film came out, but reading it after seeing the doc helped me in terms of fleshing out some of the statements she made on screen and nailing down dates. This happens through an interview between Magid and a couple of the editors, a handful of essays by architects, critics, and curators, and a timeline of events near the end of Barragán's life and, mainly, in the years since Magid visited Casa Luis Barragán in 2012. The book is small (I carried it in my jacket pocket to read on the subway) but has content aligned with Magid's ambitious five-year project that culminated with the film The Proposal.… (meer)